"Let's let him do it," said the Rat Skull, lumbering over from the bar. "Go ahead. Do it, faggo, and then I'll show you my chain surgery." He looked down at Remo and clanked a large towing chain.
The others played with their beer and laughed.
"C'mon, fellas," said the bartender.
"You say something?" asked the Rat Skull with the chain.
"I'm saying, only, you know, this is a bar, and…"
"He started it," said the Rat Skull with the chain, nodding to Remo.
"Well, sure, okay," said the bartender. "I know you guys have to protect yourselves."
"Yeah," said the Rat Skulls in unison.
"Are you ready?" Remo asked pleasantly.
"Yeah. Yeah. Ready," said the Rat Skulls.
"No vomitty, vomitty," said Remo. "It can be bloody."
"We don't upchuck," said a Rat Skull.
"Good. Because there's a penalty if you get sick. You lose your nose, too."
"Go ahead," said the Rat Skull with the chain, and he chuckled.
"Here comes the handsy wandsy," said Remo, fluttering his fingers. The hand started slow, like the backswing of a golfclub, but when it came down it looked as if it were yanked on the end of a whip.
Two fingers separated and Remo's hand closed on the face, and the two fingers joined together again, and there was a snap as if the whip had been cracked. The Rat Skull with the chain felt a sharp tug as if a baby tooth had been pulled. From the middle of his face. His breathing was suddenly funny also. Like he was drawing breath directly into his head. But it was moister than breath. He stood there dumbly with a big red splash in the middle of his face and two holes in the middle of the red splash and it stung.
"Got your nosey wosey," said Remo coyly and he showed the sitting Rat Skulls his right hand. Protruding from two fingers might have been a thumb. If thumbs had nostrils.
Remo opened his hand and dropped the lump of flesh into a Rat Skull's beer which turned a pinkish gold.
"No uppy chuck," said Remo.
"Oh, Jeez," said the Rat Skull with a nose in his beer. And one might have thought they would take this harshly and not in the spirit of fun and games. But Remo prevailed upon them all. They certainly wanted no hostilities. Especially after Remo informed them he was also a genital surgeon.
They all agreed it was only fun and games.
"Drink your beer," said Remo, and the Rat Skull with the pink beer passed out.
On the short drive back to the motel in the rented car, Remo listened to a radio panel discussion on prison reform. One woman complained about the violence of the law.
"Violence by the law only encourages more disorders," she said. She did not mention that, as the police used their guns less and less, more and more people stayed prisoners in their homes from fear of those outside the law who did use violence. Remo thought of the Rat Skulls back at the roadhouse and how, if he could not have defended himself extraordinarily well, he might have been just another victim.
It did not surprise Remo to hear that the woman lived in a very expensive high rise apartment in Chicago. She was being magnanimous with the lives of those people who could not afford doormen.
The law was becoming less efficient in fighting street crime, the punishments were becoming lighter, and therefore street crime rose. It was not complicated. Only the solutions were complicated. Like this woman on the radio who thought that all the government had to do was to transform the nature of the human animal. To do that, she called for abolishing prisons.
"They don't cure anybody anyway. The criminal comes out more hardened than before." If anybody had any further ideas on the subject, she would be interested in hearing them. They could write her.
At her summer place on the outskirts of Manitoba.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wanda Reidel had the package, so why was Summit Studios acting like assholes? She had an Academy Award director, an Academy Award writer, and the one actor who could make it all go, and did Summit want to pass up another Godfather? Another Sting? Was that the kind of business Summit was in, because if it was in that kind of business, she wasn't forgetting that they had some very important shareholders who were already miffed about the last deal they blew, and crowns did not rest easily on the heads of studio chiefs.
"Threatening? Who's threatening?" said Wanda. Her secretary leaned lovingly over her puffy pale body with the red lips, rearranging the gray-blonde hair that Wanda's hairdresser assured her was "Wanda."
"It's you, precious loved one," he had said. The hair looked like Hollywood-stucco. Wanda Keidel or Ms. Reidel or "the Octopussy," as she was known in Hollywood, covered herself in original print muu-muus and a treasury of jewels, which gave the impression of a geodesic dome draped in Appalachian neon and spangled with shiny green-and-white rocks. These rocks looked very much like costume jewelry popular in the Bronx where Wanda was raised.
When the Octopussy had her first million-dollar month, she had a Rome jeweler construct the jewelry to her specifications. Two of his artisans quit. But that was more than made up for by his new clients. If you wanted to be in with Wanda, you bought your jewels at her favorite store in Rome.
One actress even ordered a $20,000 brooch, with this instruction: "Make it Wanda-style schlock."
In Hollywood, it was called "Wandaful Jewelry." The artisans who had crafted universal elegance for the Windsors, Rothschilds and Krupps, using the genius of Cellini, now followed closely what was selling in Woolworth's off the Grand Concourse on Fordham Road.
"I'm not threatening," said Wanda. "I don't threaten. I make money magic. If your shareholders get on your ass because you don't make money for them, it's not my fault."
"Wanda, darling," said Del Stacy, who also had a marine nickname in Hollywood-the Crustacean- "you could get away with this at the beginning of your career a long time ago, but not now."
"What's a long time ago?" Wanda asked.
"Last Thursday. You're slipping, precious."
"Hah," said Wanda, with a bubbly little chuckle.
"Kiss, kiss," But when she put down the phone, the sunshine left her face for a dark, brooding storm.
"Get the fuck out of here, cunt," she said to her secretary.
"Yes, precious," said the secretary.
When the secretary had backed out in the bowing posture that the Octopussy required, Wanda drummed her green fingernails with the inset cameos of the Taj Mahal, onto the mother of pearl desktop. A former studio vice president had once suggested that the desktop looked like formica in a wetback kitchen. He was now selling tractor supplies in Burbank.
She glanced out her pink-tinted windows at Sunset Boulevard. The little bastard at Summit was right. She was slipping. Not a great big slip, but what more did you need to become Lash Larue or Mack Sennett in a town where breakfast was yesterday?
The Summit deal had to go through. It was really a very good deal. A perfect package. Everyone would make money. An Academy Award director, an Academy Award writer, and the one actor who could make it all go.
Unfortunately the writer was under contract to another agent, and the director wasn't talking to her. A peculiar sort of sickie who nurtured unreasonable grudges, he, childlike, had become fixated with an impossible promise and, childlike, wouldn't let go of it or even slightly forget that he didn't get the toy that was precisely promised. Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando. The name got stuck in his mouth like a broken record. Marlon Brando.
He couldn't understand Brando was booked. Couldn't, in any mature manner, see that one actor was impossible and therefore, like a grownup, you used what was possible. Brando was booked, so you used Biff Ballon.
"What's the difference?" Wanda had asked. "Biff can play the grandfather. You dye his beautiful blond hair. You cover up his beautiful muscles with padding. Let me tell you, it would be easier to get Biff made up for the grandfather part than it would be to get Marlon physically in shape for Racket Lover. I'd like to see Marlon swing from a burning building with a tommy gun in one hand and a knife in his teeth without messing his hair."